Ciscos’ network admission control, or NAC, capabilities will be interoperable with Microsoft network access protection, or NAP, technology that will be available in the forthcoming Windows Vista desktop and Longhorn server operating systems. Both technologies have similar goals. They have, for example, been designed to stop remote and mobile PCs from connecting behind the corporate firewall and then infecting other machines on the network.
While the outcome likely will offer significant advantages to customers looking to protect their networks from infected machines, the new architecture won’t be commercially available until the second half of 2007. A limited beta version is expected later this year.
The companies released a white paper detailing the architecture and details for how the companies’ NAC and NAP will interoperate. They also demoed the architecture, at the Security Standard Conference in Boston.
The architecture allows communication, policy enforcement and network health assessment across NAC and NAP, and for software makers to build and market new offerings to work within it in.
Customers will still be able to buy either Cisco NAC or Microsoft NAP technology alone, and be able to use the interoperable software, said the companies.
